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Singapore Politics

A Dec. 12 news article on politics in Singapore reports that the crime of the opposition politician Chee Soon Juan was that he ''misstated a statistic to a Parliamentary committee and blamed it on a typing error.''

It was much more than that. Mr. Chee has repeatedly alleged in public and in a submission to a Parliamentary Select Committee that the Government's share of national health care expenditure had plunged from 40 percent to 5 percent. Questioned by the committee, he insisted that his figures were correct but cited references that did not back his figures. Mr. Chee then contended that the 5 percent figure was a typographical error. Using what he later admitted to be a wrong method of calculation, he explained that the figure should have been 25 percent but the ''2'' was accidentally dropped. The reference to 5 percent appeared in six different places.

It is also not true that J. B. Jeyaretnam, another opposition politician, was fined, jailed and barred from holding office ''because of an unpaid debt to a ruling party member.'' Mr. Jeyaretnam was convicted on charges of making a false statutory declaration and fraudulent transfer of funds.